Whitlock House

After his father is fired from his job in the kitchen of the local golf club—for the crime of feeding two homeless men—eleven-year-old Evan Evans watches his family come apart within the span of a single Welsh winter. His mother flees to Cardiff for work. Bailiffs board up the house. Father and son end up sleeping in a caravan in the garden, singing hymns to keep from freezing.

Out of options, Evan marches his father up the hill to Whitlock House, the crumbling mansion above town with ties to a local hospital. There, they find a woman living without electricity, wrapped in an attic’s worth of inherited furs with a strange cat in a top hat. She calls herself Lady Whitlock. Against all reason, she takes Evan and his father in.

Following his widely acclaimed Sipsworth, Simon Van Booy returns with a novel as warm and wise as its predecessor, with a nostalgic shimmer of Dickens, Dahl, and Grey Gardens.

Set in the village of the author’s childhood in rural North Wales, Whitlock House is the story of an improbable friendship formed during one glowing season in a magical ruin—and of the families we create when the family we’re born into desperately needs saving.